The stunning KDE Plasma 5.25 has been released and is now available to download and upgrade. This guide explains the steps required to upgrade to KDE Plasma 5.25 from prior version 5.24.
KDE Plasma 5.25 is the 27th edition of Plasma desktop that brings significant changes that include dynamic accent colour, floating panel, new wallpaper, more gesture support and many such features.
Here, you can read details about the KDE Plasma 5.25 features in our round-up post.
If you are running an earlier version of KDE Plasma via KDE Neon Linux Distribution, this is how you can upgrade to the latest version.
Table of Contents
How to Upgrade to KDE Plasma 5.25
Firstly, the upgrade size is around 40% higher compared to Plasma 5.24. The KDE Plasma 5.25 upgrade size in KDE Neon is close to 1 GB on my test machine.
Second, make sure to close all the running applications before you start the upgrade process.
The KDE Neon upgrade process is generally stable and never failed me. But if you want to be extra cautious and have valuable data, you may want to take a backup of those. But again, I believe it’s unnecessary, in my opinion.
Steps for the upgrade process
In KDE Neon, open Discover and click on Fetch Updates. Wait until the updates are downloaded.
You can verify whether Plasma 5.25 is available via the Discover upgrade package list. See the Figure 1 below.
Once you have verified, click on the ‘Update All’ button in the Discover window at the top-right.
Alternatively, you can run the below commands from the terminal and start the upgrade process in KDE Neon.
sudo apt update
sudo pkcon update
Restart the system after the upgrade process is complete.
And after reboot, you should see the brand new KDE Plasma 5.25 welcomes you.
Upgrading KDE Plasma in Kubuntu 22.04 and Fedora 36
For Kubuntu 22.04 users, you will not get 5.25 for its lifetime because it is a Long Term Support (LTS) release. Hence, KDE Plasma 5.24 LTS would remain for its entire LTS life cycle.
In addition, Kubuntu 22.10 should feature the KDE Plasma 5.25 when released in October 2022. The famous backports PPA may not get the proper backport updates for an LTS version. However, you can verify when the PPA is refreshed and may follow the below commands for further updates.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports
sudo apt-get full-upgrade
Fedora 36 users should receive KDE Plasma 5.25 during the first point release due next month.
Finally, Arch Linux users can update via the above methods once the packages are ready. It’s currently in the Arch testing repo.
Post Upgrade Feedback
I ran the upgrade process on a virtual machine with a fresh KDE Neon with KDE Plasma 5.24 installed. The upgrade process went smooth, with no surprises or errors. Well, it never failed for me to date. However, the server was a little busy; hence it took some time to upgrade.
The upgrade time entirely depends on your internet connection and KDE servers. In general, it should be completed within 30 minutes.
The first restart after the upgrade went fine and did not take much time.
Performance-wise, I felt it’s a little smooth over the prior releases, thanks to several bug fixes and under-the-hood performance optimizations.
So, overall, you can safely upgrade if you are in KDE Neon. And wait for the packages for Ubuntu and Fedora stable releases.
Enjoy the brand new KDE Plasma!
